My C Thread Library

This project implements a basic user-level thread library in C, featuring cooperative multitasking and synchronization primitives. It provides an educational comparison between custom threads and POSIX pthreads using workloads like matrix multiplication and producer-consumer problems.

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🚀 Features

• Custom thread creation, scheduling, and joining
• Cooperative multitasking via mythread_yield
• Spinlock implementation for thread synchronization
• Matrix multiplication with performance benchmarking
• Producer-consumer problem with thread safety
• Performance comparison with pthread library using Gnuplot

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📄 Files

• userthread.c: Core thread library implementation
• userthread.h: Thread library header
• main.c: Entrypoint for testing APIs
• matrix.c: Matrix multiplication using custom threads
• pthreadmatrix.c: Matrix multiplication using pthreads
• producer_consumer.c: Producer-consumer implementation
• plotmatrix.c: Plotting code for benchmarking
• plot.gnu: Gnuplot script to visualize results
• mythreaddata.txt: Custom thread timing data
• pthreaddata.txt: Pthread timing data
• test1.c to test5.c: Unit and concurrency tests
• Makefile: Build script
• README.md: Project documentation

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⚙️ Build Instructions

To build everything:

make all

This compiles the thread library and all binaries. If directories for binaries, libraries, or logs are needed, create them:

mkdir -p bin lib log

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🧪 Running Examples

Matrix Multiplication

Using custom threads:

bin/matrix <threads> <matrix_size>

Using pthreads:

bin/pthreadmatrix <threads> <matrix_size>

Producer-Consumer Problem

bin/producer_consumer

Run All Tests

make run

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📊 Performance Visualization

To compare custom thread vs. pthread performance:

gnuplot plot.gnu

This uses mythreaddata.txt and pthreaddata.txt for plotting.

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🛠 Makefile Targets

Target	Description
make all	Build everything
make run	Run all test programs
make clean	Clean compiled files
matrix	Run matrix multiplication
producer_consumer	Run producer-consumer problem

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⚠️ Notes

• Ensure mythread_gettid is correctly defined in userthread.c and declared in userthread.h.
• Use -std=gnu99 or later if inline assembly issues occur.
• For errors like MAP_STACK or __jmpbuf, comment out system-dependent code for portability.

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📜 License

MIT License — free to use, modify, and share.

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👨‍💻 Author

Developed by Gaurav Chaudhari
M.Tech, Computer Science — IIT Madras

For questions or suggestions, raise an issue or submit a PR!